https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-there-more-matter-than-antimatter/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-digest&utm_content=link&utm_term=2019-03-21_top-stories&spMailingID=58798902&spUserID=Mzk5MzY5OTMwNjI2S0&spJobID=1602779071&spReportId=MTYwMjc3OTA3MQS2
Why do we exist? This is arguably the most profound question there is and one that may seem completely outside the scope of particle physics. But our new experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has taken us a step closer to figuring it out.
To understand why, let’s go back in time some 13.8 billion years to the Big Bang. This event produced equal amounts of the matter you are made of and something called antimatter. It is believed that every particle has an antimatter companion that is virtually identical to itself, but with the opposite charge. When a particle and its antiparticle meet, they annihilate each other—disappearing in a burst of light.
Why the universe we see today is made entirely out of matter is one of the greatest mysteries of modern physics....
...Antimatter particles should in principle be perfect mirror images of their normal companions. But experiments show this isn’t always the case. Take for instance particles known as mesons, which are made of one quark and one anti-quark. Neutral mesons have a fascinating feature: they can spontaneously turn into their anti-meson and vice versa. In this process, the quark turns into an anti-quark or the anti-quark turns into a quark. But experiments have shown that this can happen more in one direction than the opposite one—creating more matter than antimatter over time.
...While we still cannot completely solve the mystery of the universe’s matter-antimatter asymmetry, our latest discovery has opened the door to an era of precision measurements that have the potential to uncover yet unknown phenomena. There’s every reason to be optimistic that physics will one day be able to explain why we are here at all.
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